The Wolfman

ELEVEN

I woke up on the bedroom floor the next morning, right in the same spot where I had blacked out the night before. A lot of the blood on the tarp had dried black, and it was as sticky as sin. It felt like there were a million grains of sand mixed into the slush that had been my body, but it wasn’t sand. It was pulverized bone. I stretched and spit the thick muck that lined the walls of my mouth out onto the tarp.

It was a workday, and the alarm clock was going off. “Magic Carpet Ride” blared from KBTO. I could hear birds chirping outside, just like everything was hunky-dory according to them.

I would always set the clock a little earlier than usual the morning after—that way I’d have the chance to do some tidying up before heading in. I hated leaving the place looking like an abattoir while I was off whipping up Louisiana Burgers for the general public.

I was naked, of course, and covered in a thick layer of dried blood. As I wiped the sleep from my eyes and began to rise, the dried blood flaked off of me like flower petals and fell to the hardwood floor. All about me were hairs, sinews, and short lengths of muscle—some of them mine, some of them not mine. A row of teeth rested by my foot, attached to a brittle piece of jawbone. A handful of fragments of my victim’s skin rested in a constellation all about the floor, and drips of blood dotted themselves all along the floors of my house.

I’d pull the piss-colored rug back later, once I cleaned.

I limped to the living room—still not comfortable in my own skin—and lit myself a smoke. My lungs felt new and clean. Everything was as I’d left it. All in all, I felt fine, maybe even a little happy. I felt like I’d done someone a really big favor when I didn’t have to. Like I was a Good Samaritan. That kind of feeling.

After a brief inspection of the house to make sure I still had all my windows and there wasn’t anything horrible out in front—some eviscerated remnant of a human being, a stack of dead bodies, claw marks along the outside of the house—I made a pot of coffee. As that was going, I took the all-important shower.

It never ceased to amaze me how much effort it took to get all the blood out from around my fingernails. It was always a pain in the ass. That, and my hair. On skin, I’d often resort to using steel wool on myself, like I did that day. It hurt, but it worked, and any cuts I received would be gone by the end of the day. On hair, like the hair on my chest and around my happy place, I used one of those back-scrubber brushes. It worked well enough, but there were always little bits of blood I’d have to pick off hairs with my fingertips.

I shampooed twice, then conditioned twice. As the second bout of conditioner went to work, I got out of the shower and went over to the cabinet above the sink. I pulled out my razor, my comb, and some shaving cream, then went back in the shower. I shaved in there with the use of a small mirror fixed into the wall, and combed the dried blood flakes out that had eluded the washings. The water going down the drain was pink.

That was twenty minutes of my life right there, but I was once again the most handsome sonofabitch who’d ever lived, mustache and all.

Before I dressed, I turned the radio up, hoping to hear some good news. I listened as I went around with my bucket of soapy water, cleaning up the bloody floors with a few rags. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have a go at the doorknobs too, so I started cleaning those. A special report came over about another body found up by the Crowley property, but details were nonexistent. I smiled. I even laughed. It was just like those crazy motherfuckers, going back to the scene of the crime.

“Probably to get himself off,” I said out loud. “Good riddance.”

In the bedroom, I rolled up the stinking tarp and put it in a black Hefty bag. After I scrubbed the floor, I pulled the rug into place and got dressed in my blue jeans and an old Motorhead shirt. I put my belt on, my boots, got the keys to the truck, and headed out. The day was proving to be very sunny. It matched my mood.

I turned the key in the truck, and the engine coughed.

“C’mon, you fucking worm! Fucking work!”

God came down, and the truck came back to life.

“Thank you, Jesus.”

I went to work. In four weeks, there’d be another full moon, and another chance to make someone pay. Before that, I’d have to pick another target and do the same thing all over again.

The radio in the truck didn’t work. Nor did the air-conditioning, but that’s why I had been able to afford the thing. I wasn’t worried, though. I’d get the full report from Pearce by the end of the week.

Actually, I’m lying. I was worried just a little bit about killing someone within the confines of Evelyn two months in a row. That was something I never wanted to do, for hysteria’s sake, and that’s why I got the newspapers from so many neighboring places—so I could spread the love around. This time, it was unavoidable. The Rose Killer had forced me to make an executive decision, and I didn’t regret it. The killer was an abomination who had to be stopped.

I drove through town and stopped at my newsstands just like I always did.

A few minutes later, I pulled up outside the restaurant and saw I was the first one there that day. I thought it was strange and kind of off-putting that I had somehow become the responsible one at that place. I was still late, but not as late as Abraham, and he liked his job.

I unlocked the door and turned the lights on. I put my stack of newspapers on the stool in the kitchen and fired up the grill. By the time I started taking the chairs down off the tables, Abraham showed up.

I was happy to be the first one that day. The day after—and it has never stopped, this feeling—I always struggle to act as normal as possible, because I’m a fucking paranoid. I missed having my motorcycle. The urge to take off was sometimes overwhelming. I missed the road. The wind. I’ve always had this useless worry that someone would come after me, as if the beast and I had some kind of passing resemblance. As if someone would be fortunate enough to live after seeing the goddamn thing and say “Hey, that animal that just tore apart old man Burns looks a hell of a lot like that guy from the restaurant!”

In my calmer moments I believe this will never happen, but when you grow up on G-man movies, you can’t help but think you come off like a suspect no matter what.

“Hey, brother,” I said.

“You’re one cold motherfucker, starting in with the ‘brother’ shit on a morning like this.”

“What the fuck do you mean?” I asked, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible.

“You don’t know?”

“What?” I said, giving a great performance of being genuinely pissed.

“I don’t know how to say this, but don’t you have a television? Contact with the outside world at all?”

“I get smoke signals, but they’ve been on the fritz lately.” Abe took off his cap and stared at the floor. “Your man Pearce bought it, man.”

My heart sunk somewhere below my bowels, and the taste of a dinner I couldn’t remember having came up into my mouth. My legs turned to spaghetti.

The word “What?” came up out of my mouth.

“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you. He got attacked last night, this morning. Some kind of animal or something like that, like that shit you dudes was talking about a while back. It’s all over the fucking news, man.”

I sank onto a stool at the counter.

I couldn’t think of anything to say. Me, Marlowe Higgins, the man of a thousand four-letter words, was speechless. And I couldn’t think of anything to feel. Nothing felt appropriate. Nothing felt true. I rested my head in my hands. I couldn’t do anything else.

Abraham came over and put a hand on my shoulder the way men do. I let out a groan from somewhere deep. An old place I didn’t like to visit.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I can’t fucking believe it,” I said. “I don’t know what to say.”

“You want a moment?”

“God, I don’t know. I don’t know. I think … I think I gotta get outta here.”

“You want I should call Carlos to take over for you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I think you’re gonna have to.”

“Done,” he said, and he went and got on the horn.

As he was talking on the phone, I oozed off the stool and headed toward the door. Crossing the black-and- white tiles made me dizzy. It was as if my sense of equilibrium had been destroyed, and everything appeared as if